Branden Coluccio: A journey from hyper-growth to solitary confinement reveals how Brandon remains grateful during difficult experiences.

I do really believe 100% from every part of me that everyone has the capacity to be able to do the things that they want and not to be held back by the mental baggage that's in our head that we want to push through.

Welcome to the do the Thing podcast. In each episode, we get down and personal with people who go after the things they want to make all their wildest dreams come true. Join us as we unveil and dissect a formula for what it takes to do the thing. Here is your host, Stacy Lauren.

Hey, everyone. Welcome to the do the Thing podcast. This is your host, Stacy Lauren. I am so excited to introduce you to today's guest. You guys are going to get to hear his incredible and compelling story of perseverance and such a level of deep understanding of what it means to restart your life. He grew up surrounded by hardworking entrepreneurs and their stories, successes and struggles made a lasting impact on him. At an early age, it became his mission to follow their footsteps and build companies. But he never imagined his dream would take him on the journey it did. While he experienced colossal success at a young age, his life took a complete 180. But even when the going got tough, and trust me, tough is an understatement, he still did the thing to make a lasting mark during the most challenging time of his life before giving too much away. I am excited to welcome Brandon to the show. Hey, Brandon.

Hey, Stacy. How are you?

I am good. I'm so glad you are able to come on today.

Likewise. Yeah, I'm super happy to be here. This, this will be a lot of fun. I'm excited to talk to you.

So I would love to start off and have you share your story. Tell us about you.

I will try to give you the relatively quick version, but I've got a bit of a wild story. I've been through some interesting stuff and yet. So I am originally from the suburbs of Philadelphia. I grew up kind of a small town outside the city. Grew up in an entrepreneurial family. And so everybody in my family is entrepreneurs of varied pipes. My father's a builder. My grandparents owned restaurants. My aunt owns high end clothing stores. Other family members have small businesses. And we're not talking, you know, big business here. We're talking true backbone of America, small businesses. And I just grew up in this environment, surrounded by it and had wonderful people around me to educate me, always included me in these conversations. And ever since I was a very, very young boy, I was fascinated by all this stuff. And so we'd kind of ride around with my dad and look at real estate development projects and he would kind of walk me through the math of how all this stuff worked. And so I was just fascinated from the time I was a young kid by all this. And I decided very early that I this is what I wanted to do. I wanted to build businesses. But we always get these funny looks from my family members when we would be at Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner. And I'm giving them advice as a 12 year old on things they should be doing to improve their business. So they would look at me funny and say, you know, what do you know? And so from that time I kind of was. I always had a little bit chip on my shoulder, I guess. And I always wanted to build big businesses. I never understood why they weren't trying to grow. And so I decided to go off to school and study business economics, which I thought would be helpful. It was not. And decided that the way that I would break into that world would be through kind of private equity. And as I understood it, those were the guys that were out there doing big stuff and building companies and having big transactions. And so anyway, I battled my way into a small boutique call like management consulting firm, did some M and A transaction advisory work as well just outside of Philadelphia. And I was focused on kind of biotech and big pharma. And so it was very interesting place as a young person to learn as a small shop. So I had tremendous exposure to a number of clients and the CEO of the company and everything. So I learned a lot, I learned a lot fast. And also I had no training, no actual training in healthcare whatsoever. So that was interesting. And so ultimately I made the jump into private equity after a little bit there and I worked for a small shop again just outside of Philadelphia that has been around for a long time, but very few people have actually heard of called capital Solutions. And they've done I don't know how many transactions, probably over a billion and a half in transactions by now. But they worked on primarily real estate and then also operating companies. And so I was under the operating company side and I worked on businesses, anything from kind of like we'll call it venture stage to oil and gas development projects, to companies doing, you know, $25 million of EBITDA. Right. So a huge broad range of businesses as well as kind of doing deal sourcing and origination, underwriting, all that stuff like the typical associate level work. So during that time I. Private equity is just an unbelievable place to cut your teeth As a young person in There I was probably my early mid-20s, and just the exposure you get, the level of work that you're having to handle on a daily basis, I mean, you're having, I shouldn't say you're having big boy conversations, but you're certainly in big boy meetings, right? And meetings you probably have no business being in. But it's a wonderful place to absorb information. And so I really enjoyed that time. But while I was there, kind of my entrepreneurial drive was starting to come out, right? It was starting to seep into kind of the way I thought and how I saw the world. And I'll never forget we looked at a transaction that was a company out in California. I won't say the name, of course, but business has been around for about two and a half, three years, run by a pretty young guy who's 32 years old doing about two and a half million dollars of EBITDA. And we made an offer on this business and we offered I think like seven times. And so to make the math easy, let's say, you know, they were doing 2 million at seven times a 14 million plus or minus, right? We probably offered a little more than that. We thought we made a good offer and turns out a big private equity shop out of Chicago ended up paying 11 times for this business. And so doing that kind of quick math, we had a guy who's 32 years old going to have a transaction that's going to make him worth over $20 million, his early 30s. And in that moment, this was like a marker moment in my life where I was like, man, I fought so hard to get into private equity and now I realized I'm on the wrong side of the check. What am I doing here, right? And so that was a very eye opening opportunity for me. It was a good lesson and we lost the deal. But it was a really valuable lesson. And I'll never forget that because it really showed me that the people who are doing big things, in my opinion, are the people who are out there doing difficult stuff and building companies, right? And building a company is one of the most difficult things anyone can do. And so anyway, so continue to do what I was doing there. And we started looking deeply into health care for a number of reasons. And during those efforts I bumped into guys in the substance abuse treatment space. This is back in 2014, 2015. So private equity has certainly taken notice of that space. But at that time it still was a little bit early. I'll say private equity was swimming, but they, they hadn't fully committed to that world yet. And so we kind of looked at a number of opportunities. And along the way I was introduced to a couple of guys who were executives who had kind of turned around a. Call it a struggling substance abuse treatment business. And they had gone to ownership and said, look, we fixed your business. We like some equity for doing so. You were losing money hand over fist. We've now fixed it, we've built a better company, and we're making money, et cetera. We think we deserve it. And ownership just said, nope, absolutely not. They asked multiple times and get turned down. So for anyone that's listening, if you have key managers who are coming to you and they want a little bit of the pie, saying no is a great way to get them to go out and compete with you. And so anyway, that's what these guys were doing. So they came to our firm looking to raise a little bit of capital. We put together an offer and they did not like that offer. The firm typically was not focused on, we'll call it early stage startup opportunities. And so it was kind of outside the mandate, but we were willing to finance the deal, but on very specific terms. They didn't like those terms. Deal falls apart, I just go back to doing what I was doing. And so I get a phone call about three weeks later from these guys and they say, brandon, look, you know, we've kind of cooled off after the deal blew up. We're disappointed, the whole thing. But we really like to work with you. You're young, ambitious, talented, all this other stuff, right? They say all the right things make me feel good. And if you'd be willing to help us raise this money, they needed about 3 million bucks. We'd love to bring you on as a 1/3 partner in the business. And so I was 25 probably at the time, and so I was just excited to be invited to the party, really. And the other piece of it too is I have a family member, I have a sibling who has struggled with substance abuse her whole life, still kind of struggles. Everybody, I think, has gone through that. It's always a battle, right? It's a battle forever. And so anyway, I'd seen kind of the impact that it had on my family. Also grew up in an area where, you know, overdoses were happening a lot while I was a young man in high school and middle school and stuff like that. And so I'd seen it happen over and over again. Then all week has been wondering, why isn't anybody, like, really doing anything about this? It doesn't seem like the facilities are properly equipped. It doesn't seem like we've cracked a model that really is effective. And I still think that's true to this day, by the way. But anyway, and so it put me in a position of conflict because I'm still working for the same firm that had basically where the deal had fallen apart. So it. It would be bad etiquette to just kind of jump ship and. And go after that opportunity. So I went to the managing director that I worked for and explained what had happened, and he said, look, I understand this is a personal mission for you as well. I'd love to support you, and I think you should go after it. And wrote me a check and opened his Rolodex for me and helped me kind of find people to. To fill our. Our capital lead. And so anyway, so it was a. It was a really big mom from a huge mentor in my life, some of you still mentor today, and decided to take the jump into entrepreneurship, right? And so we went out, raised just under 3 million bucks, and we were off and running mid-2015. And so we had done a lot of construction on our first facility. We started hiring staff and really kind of ramped up to complete licensing and get going. And so mid-2015, we finally got that approval and we were off and running. And I knew the company would do well in terms of being able to admit patients relatively quickly because basically these guys brought over their entire team. They had the relationships they had, they knew how to kind of run these facilities, etc. And so I was not surprised when the company did well and was ramping up quite quickly. I was more surprised how quickly it all happened. And so just for reference, our target for the end of 2015, we started with about mid-2015. Our target was to be treating about 40 to 45 patients. It's called ADDC average daily census by the end of the year. We would all been very happy with that. We had kind of modeled that out in our. In our financial projections. We had the appropriate amount of capital kind of to handle that growth. And so what ended up happening is we had closer to 90 patients by the end of that year. And so very quickly we were. We were hitting up against ARM licensing capacity at that facility. And so we had to go into hypergrowth mode almost straight out of the gate. We fell into a number of cash crunches. There was a. Basically we turned off our billing system for some unknown terrible reason. And so we had no cash coming in for like 90 days. I mean, we made so Many different mistakes which, you know, a company in hyper growth really should not or cannot make. And so it became my job instead of, I was supposed to be the cfo, despite, I've never, I've never had an accounting class in my life, by the way. But 26 year old CFO now having to step into the head of corporate development to try to grow this thing or add capacity as quickly as we possibly can. And so that's really what I did. I outsourced all the accounting work to an actual CFO with a CPA license and all that stuff. And I would just kind of sign off on the books. And so I went off and started adding facilities. Within 18 months or so, probably less than that, maybe 12 months, we added an additional three locations. So a total of four clinical locations, all the way up from ambulatory detox with controlled substance, the whole thing, and then all the way down to supportive housing. And so we had four facility license facilities, we had corporate office, 125 silver living beds, if you add it all up, probably close to 150 staff members. And so we, we grew really, really fast, right? So by the end of 2016 we were essentially at those numbers. And that was supposed to be the time where we would hit the pause button and say, okay, let's kind of regroup. We've grown really, really quickly here. We've kind of changed market quite a bit. Because what I believe was that we had superior staffing, we had really beautiful high end facilities. Everything was really done, I thought, really, really nice. What ended up happening is I was at an M and a conference in 2016, I'm still off kind of poking around, trying to do my own deals. And I was sitting down in a speed dating session with a group out of New York that was a healthcare focused private equity firm. And they said, look, we're acquisitive in the space, we like the industry, we've got a ton of experience in health care. We're health care only. We've done, you name it, we've probably done it. We'd really like to take a look. And so I said, well, the business is still very young, it's growing like crazy that we're not prepared for transaction. And anybody who's listening to this, there's a lot of work that you have to go into to prepare a business for sale. It doesn't just happen. You don't just hand it off to a business broker, at least if you want to maximize that out and do it correctly anyway. We had not gone through any of that work and the business was still growing. We were still kind of figuring out all the kinks. So I had said straight out of the gate, we're just not there. But he said, look, I don't really care. Let's kind of keep having that conversation, see where it goes. So anyway, they start doing diligence and we get an offer. It's mid-40s for a business that's 18 months old, right. And so everybody's kind of blown away. The board basically says, well, how do we know this is a good number? And truth is, we did it right. And it's hard to value a business that's in that stage because it is so young and it's growing so quickly. So I go out and I talk to a banker friend of mine and I said, look, go have a few conversations with folks. I'm not talking like, I don't want to run a broadly shopped process. Let's do something that's a bit targeted. So he goes out, talks to, you know, maybe a handful of people, and we get an additional offer. And that one comes in at about 66 and a half. Okay. So we've, you know, increased total purchase price or total valuation by 20 million bucks. Right. So that's the deal the board decides to take. And yeah, so we signed up mid or no, late, early 2017, probably late 2016, something like that, and we're off. We're. We're got a deal signed up. We're still trying to grow a business. We're still trying to kind of stabilize, implement all the systems and processes that really needed to be implemented. That's, that's that. So we along the way, about three months later. So this is probably March So of 20, maybe February, March of 2017. I get sat down by one of the gentlemen who approached me earlier, and then a couple of the others from the team and they say, hey, Brandon, we've got kind of a problem we need to, we need to share with you. And we found out that I won't say his name, but the CEO of the company, informal CEO, had relapsed. Now, I knew that both of these guys were in recovery. I was under the impression they were in long term recovery back way in the beginning when I met them. Right. And I didn't really have any reason to doubt that. And so what had happened was is this gentleman, the CEO, had become very, very distant for a while at that point. So he was not involved in the company level. He was always on vacation or at his beach house or somewhere and wouldn't return my phone calls for weeks on end. And so I was like, why is this guy mad at me? This is how. This is how naive I was, right? I was so young, and I just. I look back now and I missed so many things. Anyway, I find out that he's using, and I'm not surprised. It's. It sort of all clicks when they tell me that. And I go, okay, well, we've got a problem, right? We've got a CEO of a substance abuse treatment business who is now relapsing. He can't go anywhere near our facility. He's like, he can't have interaction with staff. He's got to go. And so we have a conversation with the board. We get lawyers involved, right? This is getting complicated, as you'd imagine. And so basically everybody says, look, we'll support you as long as you're willing to go and get help, right? And that's. That's the goal that was kind of the mission of the company was to make sure that people were getting adequate care. We'd have employees, so the company would hire people who are in recovery. We had people who we would find out had relapsed. And so we would allow them to stay on insurance coverage so that they could continue to go off and get care. Right? We didn't just cut them off and fire them. And so we basically, we gave the same approach to him, and he had to go get care, could not come anywhere near the company, but could keep his compensation, etc. So that happens. And then the other gentleman, who was really the operationally focused guy, steps in as CEO. And so he's running this business from every angle. He's doing pretty much everything, overseeing every aspect of it. And then we're moving along and trying to get things sorted. And I get a phone call in May of 2017. So a few months later that the gentleman had overdosed and passed away in the middle of the night. I got a call. It was like 3am so it was very emotional. This person did become a friend of mine, and his passion for the industry was really the reason I decided to kind of partner up with these guys. So it was a difficult experience. It was difficult for everybody. It was also a PR nightmare, as you can imagine. And so we tried to handle that as best we could in a respectful manner. And so, yes, it was challenging. We. And now they gave me the task of, okay, well, you've got to call the buyers, Brandon, and tell them what happened. Well, and it's funny looking back, because I see all these things where, okay, well, I was kind of given the shit work that had to be done, but I always did it. And so I give them a call and they say, well, look, that's really terrible and sad and horrible that this has happened, but we've only ever talked to this guy once on the phone, right? And so that. That shows you that he really was not involved in the company. And so, anyway, so they say we're ready to carry on. And we do. So we go through. We continue through diligence the rest of the year. It takes just about a year to get through everything. Quality of earnings, finishing the audits, you name it, right? Going through a transaction is a lot of work if you've ever been through one. It's difficult. And we closed the deal at the end of 2017, December 2017. I was 29 years old and so thinking, I'm pretty smart, thinking I know what I'm doing and I can navigate these types of situations. And basically the new buyers come in, they start bringing in new talent. They brought in a CFO right away, they brought in the new CEO, and I shifted formally into a corporate development role, which is basically just helping to grow and expand the business. And we had a whole plan to do that. The old CEO, he's gone, he gets fired, etc. But the company, pretty quickly, by within three to four months, maybe a little longer, starts to have some issues. And one of those was that I found out that the government was issuing subpoenas at one of our clinical locations. So I worked out of the corporate office. I didn't really ever go to our clinical facilities all that much. I would kind of pop in and just say hi from here and there. But I got a phone call that this was happening, and we could not figure out why. And eventually it comes out after I received a subpoena. And basically they were just asking for documentation. That's all. Subpoena is a request for information and so on. The subpoena that was given to me, funny enough, when they showed up to issue my subpoena, I was in a health care compliance meeting, which I just find irony there. Anyways, I walk out of the meeting and they hand me the document and I look at it, and they're are several entities that they're requesting information on. And my heart kind of sinks immediately into my stomach. Everybody knows this feeling because on that list of entities I saw, I don't remember the exact number, but it was like four or five Entities I'd never seen before, right? And that was when I was like, oh my God, what's going on here? There's something happening. And what I found out later on, after I engaged counsel, we can't handle the documents off, et cetera, was that these two gentlemen that I originally decided to partner with had some kind of elaborate kickback arrangement going on with a laboratory facility down in Florida. And so for anybody who doesn't know healthcare to pay kickbacks and in other industries as well, but healthcare, especially to do pay or receive kickback, is highly illegal, okay? And so what was happening is the facilities that we were running were producing urine samples. Those urine samples were being sent to. And the gentleman who owned this laboratory, I found out later, was buddies with the guy who passed away. And so those samples were being sent to his facility. He was then billing insurance for it and then kicking these guys back some money based on what was paid. That is highly illegal, as my lawyer would say. A nine year old could prosecute these guys for this. I genuinely had no idea that this was happening. And so obviously that's concerning. And things kind of continue to progress. Staff starts to revolt, the licensing authority starts to kind of issue their requirements. And so the wheels are falling off the bus, right? And I'm still working for the company, but I'm off kind of doing my other things as well, knowing that the time soon is probably coming when I'm going to be fired, as it usually happens to the C suite when private equity comes in. But anyway, so everybody I talked to at the time said, brandon, you're probably fine based on what we know. Okay, cool. So I just kind of continue to live my life, try to be as helpful as I can to the new owners and do everything I could to help them kind of protect their investment. And I later find out that the government starts digging into other things. And one of the things that they were digging into was the company was providing patient financial assistance to people who did not have the financial resources to get into care. And I did know about this. And so I actually was. So they came to me with this concept, if you've ever heard of a care credit, right, you can get loans to go get care for healthcare, any kind, plastic surgery, you name it, right? And so the idea was to set something up similar where people who could not have resources would be able to borrow money, go get coverage so they would be able to pay for coverage so they could get care and then receive care and then kind of pay those loans back once they were Stabilized. That was the plan that they had presented. So we had go to a lawyer, we get an opinion letter. And on that opinion letter the lawyers say, okay, this is fine as long as these several things are in place. And otherwise it could be considered patient inducement, which is also not allowed in healthcare. So we go and the business kind of gets set up and they provide loans to people and very clear that it has to follow a very strict and specific process, lots of documentation, et cetera. Well, I found out later on that that documentation was not really happening. And so what was going on was basically they were just giving money to patients to go get insurance and then come and get care, not necessarily at our facilities, but in general. And so by the time that we figured all this out, it was kind of too late. And so that program got shut down as soon as we found out that everything was not being done properly. Anyway, I found out later on that the government was also now looking into that. So we've got a couple issues that they're looking into. I'm continuing to live my life, continuing to do what I have to do within the company. But now all of a sudden, the sponsor, the new buyer, is gearing up for a lawsuit against the previous owners. And since I'm a previous owner and an employee, I'm in a position of conflict. So I had to resign, which was a very difficult thing for me to do. I loved that business. I loved the people who worked for it. I've never worked with a more passionate group of people in my life. And I saw a lot of really wonderful things happen. When you look back at some of the things that have been written about that business today, I don't recognize that business when, when I read it from that person's perspective, I remember a business that was solely dedicated to really helping to transform people's lives and did do that on a number of cases. So anyway, so I have to resign. I move on. I start a real estate development company with a couple of guys who are running a wealthy individual's family office. And we start focusing on doing self storage deals. And we did a number of deals. We did three deals in our first year. And that ultimately ended up two of them ultimately ended up being multimillion dollar transactions. Later on, once they were stable, built and stabilized, I was in process of buying another company that I was going to kind of grow. And so I'm moving on with my life. And all of a sudden one day I'm at my real estate development company, I'm at the office And I get a phone call from my counsel and he says, brandon, I just, just got a call and I have some terrible news. And the news that was given to me was that the government has made a decision. They are going to be making an example out of this case and everyone involved, they're going to be handing down a string of indictments and your name is on the list. And so at that point, I was probably 30 years old. I had lived my life in what I believed was an ethical and law abiding manner forever. I'd never been in any trouble of any kind, that had a wonderful reputation in the community. I was what many people would consider successful. I just married a woman of my dreams. And so everything in my life was going really, really well. And this is kind of what I talk a little bit about in my book. And then all of a sudden, with a phone call, it all changed. Right, right then and there. The moment if you're a professional, you're a non criminogenic individual and you find yourself in that situation, it erased everything. And so it was a very difficult moment. I told my partners I immediately resigned from the company. We had institutional investors. I didn't want them to find out. And then my partners have to pay for my baggage. And so anyway, I resigned, gave him back all my equity and just kind of moved on and went home to my wife and had to have those conversations with family and friends and sit down and tell them what was happening. And it was difficult. It was horrible. Some of the worst, worst years of my life. But I vowed from the beginning to fight it. I felt like that they had kind of unfairly lumped me in with, with some of these other folks who had truly been doing things that they should not have been. And I didn't believe that I was a part of that. And so anyway, so I vowed to fight it. A year later and probably half a million bucks in legal fees, my lawyer kind of sits me down on the eve of trial. We've been preparing for weeks. And he says, look, Brandon, you're young, you've got a lot of life in front of you. I don't want to see you get into a situation here where if we lose a trial, and I'll share a bit of detail here for the people who may not understand this, but there's something called the trial penalty. And this is where the government will then basically overcharge, knowing that because you're now requiring them to do a bunch of work and allocate more resources towards your case, and so instead of facing a couple of years, you could be facing like 15, 20, 30. And this is where you hear people who get hit with multiple wire fraud charges. I think wire fraud was like 20 years per charge. So they'll get like five charges, right? So in the news, you'll see they're facing 100 years in prison. Well, most people don't ever get that, but the government does that with the expectation that you get 7, 8, 10. Right? Which for me, I'm 30 years old, going, wait a minute, this is even a consideration. Why are we having this conversation? So he's sitting down and he's explaining this to me, and I say, well, okay, fine. What does a deal look like? What does that include? And so he goes off and has a conversation, and they come back with, look, 37 months in prison and about $3.1 million in fines, which about threw up on my shoes when I heard that. And I said, that really wasn't much of an offer, was it? And he says, look, we've tried to negotiate it. They won't budge. This is kind of it, right? So we're at a. An impasse here. We've got to decide what we're going to do. We really don't have a lot of time to make that decision. So I was blessed enough to have really good advisors in this situation. And they said, brandon, look, you know, 37 months is. It sounds like a lot, but it's kind of magic number for a variety of reasons, and you could be home within a year to 18 months. And I was like, okay, so I'm now having to pick between two terrible things. Even that's better information, but it's still terrible. But the consequences of going to trial and losing are real. And those advisors had allowed me to speak to a few people who had made that choice, who believed they were innocent, protect their innocence, and went to trial and fought it and lost. And so some of those people did seven years, 10 years plus. And so I actually got to speak to the folks who'd made that choice. And what I ultimately came back to was that I could not look my wife in the face and say, yeah, I'm going to ask you to stand by me through this. If I lose, I would want her to go on and be happy and move on with her life, because it's like, look, 10, 10 years apart, right? That's not fair. We've just been married, et cetera. She, of course, yelled at me for that. But anyway, I couldn't do it. And so I just decided, look, I'll take my lumps, I'll sign your. Whatever it is you want me to sign. I just want to move on. And so that's ultimately what I did. I changed my plea. I believe it was February 2019 or February 2020, I think, actually. Sorry. And then I was able to self surrender on July 21st, I believe it was, of 2020. I went to a low security facility in Danbury, Connecticut, and I ultimately did ten and a half months inside. This was mid Covid. And so if you want to hear an interesting story, during COVID they were requiring everybody who came into the FAC quarantine because everybody. This was still when people really didn't fully understand Covid and what was happening. And so if you were coming in or going out, you had to quarantine. And that meant, who knows. When I first showed up, I asked them the question, how long will I be in quarantine? One person said like three days, another person said seven, and somebody else said three weeks. So I knew it was somewhere in that range. And it ended up for me, my first quarantine being 22 days. So I'd never been to prison, I'd never been in handcuffs. I've never been in trouble in my life. And I'm now having to go sit in solitary confinement for three weeks straight out of the gate. That will change a person. So I, I self surrender, I show up, I go into quarantine, and I eventually moved into a certain housing unit that is focused on. It's called the RDAP housing unit. And it's a program for basically helping people with drugs, alcohol and criminogenic behavior. And so I take a leadership role in this community. I start, I started teaching entrepreneurship classes, I started teaching people financial literacy, kind of like mindset classes, and, you know, helping people kind of get motivated for turning their lives around when they ultimately left. I felt like I had a lot to offer these people. I met people whom otherwise I probably never would have interacted with. I made some really wonderful relationships with some great guys while I was there from different parts of the country, from different communities, from different backgrounds. In many ways I'm grateful for that because I come from a pretty privileged life, right. And that just. I'll call a spade a spade. And I got to meet some guys who've had. Had a tough, tough life. And I hope that I was able to kind of positively impact them. And they certainly positively impacted me in many ways. And I did ten and a half months, as I said, helping people Kind of get their lives together. I volunteered in the GED department. I taught people how to read. I did as much as I could to try to do something good and turn this horrible situation into, into a positive if I could. And so, yeah, so I, I got out probably June of 2021, I guess it would be. And I've been on the road to rebuilding my life ever since. And I'm kind of writing a book, sharing that story and now I'm helping companies turn themselves around and build and scale and exit. And I've been rambling a lot, so I'll give you an opportunity to jump in. But that was a very difficult experience, as you'd imagine. But as I think challenging experiences can be. Not always, but can be. It's also one of the most instructive experiences in my life. And in many ways I'm grateful for what happened. I'm a much better person today than I was then. But that was because I had to go through all of that pain and kind of harvest the lessons that were buried within that, that journey. And so anyway, that's my story, that's my journey that I've been on. And I'm happy to kind of dive into detail or go off on another angle if you'd like.

Yeah, thanks so much for sharing because I think a lot of times people don't see the behind the scenes of like where people are out and how they get to where they want to be. And it's the amount of stuff that you've been going through. And the thing that I was going to ask you, it's interesting as you were talking about prison and being in there and I was thinking, oh wow, that must be amazing now for you because you're able to take the things that you learned in there and applying them out in the world, but you actually did it while you were still in prison. And I think that's the thing to me that really stands out, is that you didn't look at that as time passing by. You actually looked at it like, how can I make my mark while I'm here?

Yeah, I did. And I actually started before prison. I wrote another book called Looking Forward the Never Quit Mentality and built a little self directed course that went along with it. And I licensed it to a company that provides educational materials for people in prisons and around the country. And it was really cathartic for me in many ways because I was, I was trying to process what I was going through. But the moment that this happened, I promised myself and my wife that I would not let this destroy me. Right. And I was going to do everything that I could to try to turn this horrible event into something positive. And so that has been my mission. It continues to be my mission. And I hope to kind of impact people with the book that I'm working on now for years to come. And I still. I still teach entrepreneurship classes, by the way, to people who are formerly incarcerated through a group called Inmates to Entrepreneurs. So I'm a. I'm an entrepreneurship coach for them. So I. I fell in love with teaching, and I fell in love with helping people. And so like you said, I mean, there's. There's so much beauty in our challenges in life. You just have to. You have to search for it, and you have to be willing to face yourself in the process.

So when did you write that book, though, Looking forward, Was that when you were in prison or when you were going through all the stuff before?

It was. Yeah, it was before. So I was living in this. And if anybody's ever been through this indictment process, the hardest part is the uncertainty of not knowing what's going to happen to you. Harder than prison, for sure. And so during that time, I was basically. I was trying to figure out how I was going to get through it. So I wrote it down and started documenting it. And I never really publicized it. It was more an exercise for me than it was anything else. And then kind of share that information with another organization that was distributing the material. So. So that was early on, before I went away.

So this is something I've been talking to a lot lately on do. The thing is, when you're walking through the fire, sometimes it's hard to see outside the trees. You have to be. Almost have space from the thing in order to really see what's really important and what matters. How do you think you did it while you were still in the middle of it?

I sought mentorship. The section of my book, actually, and it's. It's having the humility to reach out for help. And I ended up reaching out to somebody who is a mentor to me. He's a guy who spent 26 years in prison, yet he has done more for the world. Despite him only being in the world for such a short period of time than most people I know. And he shared the lessons of his life and his journey with me and really inspired me to look at my situation differently. I was very much playing the poor me role. Why did this happen? All the things we tell ourselves. And he. He forced me to take radical accountability for my life and for the situation that I was in. And I firmly believe that today that our lives are the, the outcome of all the little decisions we've made. And the moment that I sought help and then decided to internalize that help, that it wasn't what I wanted to hear, right. But I had to internalize it and I had to accept it and I had to see the world as it was, not as I wanted it to be. And that was when it shifted for me. But in the beginning, when I was first, when I first got that phone call I mentioned, I, oh, im immediately was like, oh, this is, this is bull. This is not fair, this is right. You're immediately kind of looking outside for an answer or you're looking, you're looking to blame everything around you, but you're not looking at yourself. And that for me was a transformative moment. And that is how I began to make that shift while I was still in the fire.

So for someone listening, if they're in the middle of it, what do you think would be kind of a first step for them to be able to kind of do the same thing in.

A different way, have the humility to ask for help? I mean, the part of the reason I'm, I'm putting this book out there is because, and I'm aiming it towards people who are, were like me, the high achieving entrepreneur who maybe life hasn't gone great, right. Or things went well, maybe they didn't. Right. Or they've had a big failure, a big loss, some kind of a big setback in life if you were not as high achieving, non criminogenic people who, who are trying to do big things, we're not used to failing miserably. Right. And I live one of the biggest failures somebody could experience. And so we're not used to that. And so you have to be willing to get radically honest with yourself and take full accountability of your life and kind of what has happened and what you've done to get yourself there. And you have to reach out for help. So anybody who's listening, I mean I would encourage people to, I talk to people all the time about this, by the way, who are in difficult situations, not just a prison setting, but all kinds of situations in life. And I help guide them through it. And I do that because that's what this individual did for me. Right. They helped guide me through the fire and helped me come out the other side a way better person than I was before I walked in. So it is truly possible to transform Your life through difficult experiences, through failure, through setbacks, whatever it might be. But failure and loss and struggle can also eat you alive if you let it. Right? And I think the difference is the people who make the commitment to seeking help and to trying to better themselves and take the lessons that come from failure and struggle. Those are the people who end up overcoming it and kind of moving on with their lives and becoming better people in the end.

So when you were writing that first book, you were in that in between stage. You have no idea what's happening with you. So you're completely just in this. I mean, I'm imagining like a fear state, right?

Oh, yeah. Total, total fear. Yeah.

I'm in the middle of planning the do the thing, start a book challenge, and I just feel like this is the. The way you wrote the first book, and I do want to get to the second one. The way you wrote the first book is such a way of catharticism, of being able to help you, like you said, process this really difficult thing that you're still in the middle of and trying to manage. And I just feel like there's gotta be so much power in that story in the way that you were able to get it out of your head.

So, yeah, it was. And it was interesting because it was done under a rapid timeline, because I was unsure. Every day, when you're living in that setting, Stacy, you're just like, somebody's, the marshals are going to blast through the door and take me away. You live in that moment. Wake up in the middle of the night, I would be in tears. That's the level of fear you're living in. And so for me, it was, I can't live this way anymore. I'm going to die of the stress, right? I'm going to have a heart attack. And so it was really an instruction manual for myself. It was, okay, this is not going to be perfect. I've never written a book before. It's probably gonna suck. But you know what? Let's do it. Let's start the process. And so I started by kind of looking back at what had happened and beginning to set goals and define how I wanted to see success in the end of this and just getting as specific as possible and then making that choice and committing to it. And along the way, I kind of tried to document it as much as I could and. And just really started to just hammer out as much material as I could get on paper and understanding and accepting that, you know what, this is not going to be perfect. It's not going to be a beautiful work of art, but it could help me and it could also help others. And so I just did the thing, as you say, Right. I just sat down and we cranked it out and I did have somebody help me with it. I had an editor who kind of helped guide me through the process as well. So that was really helpful. But it's really just about kind of taking action and starting. Starting messy. Just get it done. Look, if you read the book, it's nothing amazing. It's all fairly basic, but it was really what I needed to do at that time. And I hope that it's helped other people as well.

Yeah, and I like that you said that because one of the reasons I'm doing the Start a Book challenge, it's for personal growth. I want people to, whether they finish it or not finish it or whether it's good, it's not good. Whatever that story is that's in your head that you want to get out, even if it's fiction and it's a make believe thing or something that you've lived and you want to just kind of process is just to get it out of your head. Because the more you can get out of your head, the more you are actually able to get into your heart and more things start to become aligned to you.

Yeah, no, that's. That's a fact. And the writing process is a very interesting process. My more recent book, I've felt the different emotions that have come along that process because one, you're looking back and it's kind of about my story and I'm looking back at very painful journey. So that's tough. But it just. What I mean is the process of writing is. Is incredible because it's both exciting and fun and terrible all at the same time. Right. So my more recent book has been an exercise in that. And I'm trying to take my time and really get this one right. So we'll see how it turns out.

Yeah, let's talk about that. Because it's totally different approach. The first one, you have no idea what's happening and you're still living, like we said, in the fire. Right. And you're just using it as more of a processing tool more than anything. This one, you're almost. You've already been there, done that, and now you're actually trying to teach something. Is that right?

That's correct. Yeah, that's exactly right. So the first one was almost like an instruction manual, like I said, for myself and others who might Be trying to overcome something. And then the next one is kind of like the. It's the next iteration of, okay, well, you've gone through this terrible thing. Well, what lessons are buried within that terrible thing that can be instructive and valuable for you in your life as you move forward? And I share a lot of the stories of kind of what I went through and then a bunch of the different lexins while I was away. I read a lot, as one would expect. I read I don't know how many books I wish I read the less books. That's another interesting tidbit with prison is I think we read to distract ourselves a bit. And I look back and, man, I read like 150 books and I barely remember what I read. Right. So there's some of that. But I did focus a lot on philosophy, kind of understanding life. And I read some stuff on business and entrepreneurship and a bunch of biographies. And I learned a lot of lessons. And so I'm sharing a lot of what I learned and also what I've experienced as I went through that journey in this book. It's been a really fun one. Difficult, but fun one to write.

Do you have a name for the new one?

Yes, it's called Convictions. And it's kind of a double meaning. Right. So kind of went through a conviction, and it's also the convictions that led me through that process. So I'm working on a subtitle. I haven't nailed it down yet, but the main title is Convictions.

Do you have a certain place you like to write?

So I wrote this book sitting on my balcony in the morning. So while I was in prison, I became a morning person. That was one of my goals. And so I wake up every day, like 5:30 in the morning, which is early for me. And I would just grab my laptop, grab my coffee, sit out there on my balcony, watch the sun rise, and just hammer out this book. And I would write a minimum of thousand words a day. I did that for 90 days, had 90 to 100,000 words in my original manuscript, and just hammered it out. And the thing about writing, if anybody's listening and never working on their own book, is like, if you're reading what you're writing and it's terrible, that's okay. That's how it goes. And I don't know if you ever read On Writing by Stephen King. And that's where I got this process from, is he just sits down every morning for. I forget how exactly how long. Several hours, four or five hours. And he Just commits, He just writes. And most of it gets tossed, but that's the part. That's the process. And so for me, that environment of being in the early morning sun and getting all this done before my day and really started, people are waking up and going to work, and you're. You're like, I've accomplished the most difficult thing I could today already, before anybody else has begun. So it's a great way to start the day.

Yeah, that's such a great feeling. Regardless of what it is you're doing in the morning, if it's something that feels hard and you do it, it's just such a power feeling, is to already win the day with whatever that thing is. What would happen? You're sitting there and there's nothing on the page. Right. How do you get motivated? Or just how does you get your brain to open up to get it on the page?

I would literally just start writing what I was thinking. And I'm serious, verbatim. This sucks. I don't know what to write. Why am I doing this? What is this book about again? Where am I going with. I would literally just start writing, and then before you know it, you're like, wow, I wrote a whole paragraph about that. Or then you all of a sudden go off on, like, a tangent and you start writing about something else. It was my way of just beginning to focus my mind, or if I was feeling overwhelmed by the task in front of me, just start. And I would later go back and of course, I would delete probably 70% of what I wrote. But a lot of the time, I would get a few really interesting little bits of information or bits of advice, or I would tell a story in a certain way from that perspective. Because if you've ever written, your writing tends to reflect kind of your mood or your mindset in that particular moment. So it's kind of always interesting to go back and read. But yeah, I mean, it should just start. Just start writing stuff, even if it's total gibberish. Just get it on the page and you will eventually begin to kind of find your groove.

Did you have a pre. Or do you have a pre writing thing going on? Your balcony was one thing. Waking up in the morning was another. Do you have any pre. Little mental trick you would do?

No, no, I. I mean, I had to have my coffee, which is a requirement for any functionality out of me. But yeah, I would have my cup of coffee or kind of get myself geared up. I did do a rough outline of what I wanted to write. So I knew, and I already had that done. That was the first thing I did. And so I knew the topic that I should have been talking about, so I would maybe review my writing from the day before and then kind of get right into it, trying to continue the story from wherever I left off.

Yeah. So you made it kind of a ritual because you're doing it in the morning, you're outside on your balcony, you've got your coffee, you've got your outline. Being able to kind of see what you've written before, and then you're just writing everything that's in your head, in the moment, and then everything starts to flow from there.

Exactly. That's exactly it. It was a totally a ritual. And it was how I committed to banging out a manuscript as fast as I could, because I knew it's not the writing part necessarily that takes the most time, it's the refining. So I knew I had to get that done as quickly as I could.

What would be your advice to someone maybe listening and that wants to write about their personal story and being able to kind of take out the lessons that have come from it, or being able to help another through the words that they could write about?

Lean into your pain and be honest about it and be open, not only with it, but that starts with yourself, of course, and be honest with others. But you have to start with identifying your own kind of mistakes. And there's a section of the book called Facing Yourself, and it's really about identifying the elements of you that are not perfect. And we all have good in us, we have bad in us, and lots in between. And so if you're writing a book about your journey, I think that sharing your pain and sharing the challenges that you face in an open and honest way are not just, I think, healthy for you, but can also be very instructive to others. And I think that we need more people who want to talk about the not so comfortable things that happen in life. I'm not saying people don't. People certainly do. But I come from the world of entrepreneurship, where it's very much about big headlines and big exits and this, that, and the other thing. And very little is talked about the difficult stuff that goes on behind the scenes. And I think that in this world of Instagram and social media, I think a little bit more honesty, people be genuine about their struggles. And human, I think, resonates with a lot of folks, and it certainly has. In the feedback that I've received when I share my story, people always kind of say, well, thank you for sharing it and sharing it in such an honest way, because it really helped me kind of deal with something that I was going through or whatever it might be. So lean into your pain and be open about it and kind of lay it all out there for yourself and for others, and I think you'd be surprised what you get in return.

And what would be your biggest piece of advice for people on doing the thing?

Just do the damn thing, right? Just get out there and just start writing. If it's writing, write a little bit. I like the idea of conquering the big thing, eating the frog first thing in the morning, as it's called. And I think some people may find that overwhelming. And I had moments where that would feel overwhelming for me. And so when I'm in that state of paralysis that I think we all know, maybe especially if you're an entrepreneur, right? You're like, I have 6,000 things that need to get done. I don't know where to start, so I'm going to do none of them. Do the easy thing. If you can't get the hard thing done, just do the easy thing and then do the next easiest thing. Right? And before you know it, you've knocked off seven easy things, then you've made progress. Right? So it's just really about getting yourself moving. That's really what it's about. The same with writing. It's the same with entrepreneurship. Get yourself moving and start making progress.

Yeah, I love that. It was actually a few weeks ago is when I realized everyone's been wondering what the thing is, would do the thing. And I finally realized, you guys, it's not about the thing. It's about the do, which is the movement. Right?

That's a fact. Yeah. Yeah, well said. Exactly.

I'd love you to share where people can learn more about you and find your books and all the other great stuff that you're doing.

Yeah. So, I mean, welcome people to contact me. My email is brandonlentlessventuresio and I have a website that is also relentlessventuresio. I'm working on a personal site that will have both books and my podcast. My podcast is called Convictions. And, yeah, I encourage people to reach out to me and I love to kind of hear people's stories and help out if I can.

Thank you so much for coming on, Brandon. I am hoping we can have you come back on again because I have a lot more questions for you.

Yeah, let's do it. Anytime you want.

And for the listeners, do the thing.

Thanks for listening to the do the Thing podcast. We hope you enjoyed the show, but even more, we hope you'll be inspired to do the Thing. Do you have a burning question on Doing the Thing that you'd like answered? How about an inspiring do the Thing story of your own that you'd like to share? We'd love to hear all about it. Just leave us a voice message at dothething callcast co or email us@helloothethingpodcast.com.